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I wrestled quite a bit with how suddenly the camera flips when you change direction. I hardly notice it now but in the early days I was close to abandoning the project because of it. I'd love to see how other Pico-8 Defender-clones handle the camera.

It's probably true that the game should have music, but I have a weird phobia about adding music to games. Anything other than gunfire and explosions just feels out-of-place to me.

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Just played this on my PocketCHIP for a while and it's a blast there too. I'm slowly picking up on how the baddies react and in which order. High score is only 860 so far but that felt really good to reach.

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Really freakin hard. Way harder than Defender. Like the style but not enough screen space to be enjoyable. Surprise!, we're on top of you. On screen, off screen, on screen, off screen. Ack. Took it to 390 and now I'm done with it. It has great potential but the rhythm needs to be work out -- if possible with the sprite size to screen size ratio.

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ditto - didn't notice the smart bomb thing. It sounds like they only help after reaching a certain skill level.

With Defender, I remember the sprites being much smaller versus the screen size. Thus, they are relatively further away and you have more time to react to them once on screen. Plus, you don't feel like you're looking at the world with blinders on like this game. Your sprites are beautiful and I'm sure you don't want to make them smaller. Thus, find a novice to play test it while you tweak speed and horizontal flipping behavior.

I remember Chopper Command feeling a bit like this so consider analyzing how they balanced it.

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it's like defender with all settings to the max, killing any balance the original had.

the worst offender is the forced scrolling, makes everything too fast. you should be able to control your thrust (and stop).

the flipping is way too fast, the ship is almost teleported from one side to the other. actually that might have worked to some extent with original defender controls since you had to press the 'reverse' button, making the manoeuvre less frequent and more thought out. but here with 4 dir keys it should handle smoothly like a flying saucer. also I'm quite sure it's unplayable with a gamepad.

the enemy seems too fast, but that might just be an effect of forced scrolling.